Blog

An interactive walkthrough of the transactional outbox pattern with Postgres and Kafka: the dual-write problem it solves, how the relay works, and what it looks like under load.

How I solved the 'I Dropped a Neural Net' weight permutation puzzle: why pairing beats ordering, Hungarian matching, and the fingerprint that fixed bad pairs.

When to use pg_advisory_xact_lock vs pg_advisory_lock vs SELECT FOR UPDATE in PostgreSQL: session and transaction scope, bigint keys, deadlocks, and a safe fetch-lock-refetch pattern, with Go and SQL examples.

SimpleStreet is a free Chrome extension for StreetEasy that shows move-in dates, hides sponsored listings, and adds notes, tags, and ratings.

Render UML and system design diagrams in Astro using rehype-mermaid-cli. Covers setup, light/dark mode, and comparisons with rehype-mermaid.

I pull live GitHub, YouTube, and LinkedIn stats into my site using public APIs, scraping, and a Cloudflare Workers proxy.

A brain dump of lessons, advice, and realizations from my first year as a new grad software engineer. Take what’s useful, ignore the rest.

I found the 3 rules that took my TikTokAPI project from 0 to 7K+ stars and 3M+ downloads: search validation, friction elimination, and discoverability tactics.

Add Giscus comments to an Astro blog with GitHub Discussions, dark-mode syncing, and no server to maintain.

Add interactive ApexCharts to Astro Markdown with a custom rehype plugin, dark-mode syncing, and a chart code block workflow.

I render Mermaid diagrams in Astro markdown with rehype-mermaid and Playwright, including dark mode support and inline images.

I look at whether web scraping is ethical, drawing on building TikTokAPI (3M+ downloads) and its use in research at Yale, Northwestern, and UNESCO.

I added client-side search to my Astro site with astro-pagefind, no third-party APIs or hosting required. Here's the setup and config.

Optimize images in Astro Markdown and content collections with Astro's Image component, build-time WebP conversion, and lazy loading.

I competed in IMC Prosperity 2, a trading competition, writing algorithmic and manual strategies each round, and finished #103 in the US, #381 overall.

I ranked every UW-Madison computer science course I took into a tier list, starting with 642 Information Security, based on what I actually learned and enjoyed.

I helped organize GitHub Field Day NYC 2024, an unconference for GitHub Campus Experts. Here's what went into planning it and what stood out at the event.

I competed in Battlecode 2024 as a first-time participant and qualified for the finals, placing 13th out of about 400 teams.

I organized MadHacks Fall 2023, a 24-hour UW-Madison hackathon with 250+ attendees and over $15K raised in sponsorships. Here's what I learned running it.

I found a broken auth flaw in LINK.social exposing every user's phone number, location, and birthday, plus an exploit to hijack any account. Bug bounty: $500.

I found YikYak attaches precise GPS coordinates, accurate to 10-15 feet, on every post, exposing 2 million users' locations. Covered by Vice and The Verge.